Main navigation

Do You Know Your Personal Values?

Have you ever asked yourself what the real influences of your decisions are? Why you prefer one situation over another? For instance why do you prefer being employed over working on your own? Or is it the other way around? Or why are you living where you are living right now? Why are you with the person you are in a relationship with right now?

It’s not primarily due to the circumstances or your emotions, especially not when there was a real decision involved. So why are you making these decisions then?

The answer lies at the core of your character, of what defines you as a person; and that is your personal value system.

What are Personal Values?

Personal values are the general expression of what is most important for you. A value expresses the worth of something, and in this case what you categorical like and dislike. So they are like categories for all your preferences in life. Values are formed starting in early childhood and are later consciously re-evaluated and can therefore be changed.

By comparing two values you can discover which is representing something that is more important than the other. Therefore you rate the one value over the other.

Personal values are generally operating in the background. They influence everything what you do but usually it happens on auto-pilot. You just know intuitively what you like and dislike and decide accordingly.

Why is it Good to Know Your Personal Values?

The answer is twofold:

First you get clarity and build your self-awareness by identifying your values and secondly knowing your highest values can act like a guide for you. It makes intelligent decisions easier. Also knowing your negative values, those from which you try to keep away from, is very helpful as well. When you are clearly aware of your value hierarchy you can consciously check situations against your value-system, which will create better decisions and results. It will be easier to keep your balance in life.

For instance when you are about to make an important decision you can double-check if going the one or the other way would go against one of your core values. On the long run, that would pose a problem for you.

So all in all it’s an awareness building process which can give you direction in life.

A List of Core Values

There are a lot of value lists out there, so here are just the real core values that most people have and that differentiate a character the most. I tried to keep the list tight and avoid repetition by synonyms:

Abundance

Accountability

Achievement

Action

Adventure

Ambition

Awareness

Balance

Beauty

Being the Best

Calmness

Cheerfulness

Clarity

Comfort

Compassion

Competition

Connection

Contribution

Control

Courage

Creativity

Curiosity

Determination

Discipline

Effectiveness

Empathy

Energy

Enthusiasm

Excellence

Fairness

Faith

Fame

Family

Flexibility

Freedom

Friendship

Fulfillment

Fun

Harmony

Happiness

Health

Honesty

Honor

Humility

Independence

Integrity

Intelligence

Intimacy

Inspiration

Kindness

Knowledge

Liveliness

Love

Money

Nature

Passion

Peace

Perfection

Persistance

Philanthropy

Power

Respect

Security

Simplicity

Significance

Spirituality

Spontaneity

Strength

Stability

Success

Status

Teamwork

Tolerance

Tradition

Truth

Vitality

Wealth

Wisdom

Create Your Value Hierarchy

In order to create your 10 top-values do the following:

Select the 10 values from the list above that you like most. (of course you can also do a Top 5 or Top 7)

Start with the first in the list. Then order this by importance by comparing two values by asking: “Which one is more important to me if I had could only have one and had to compromise the second?” Remove the winner and write it on top of a new list and then continue with the remaining 6 on the old list and so on.

Do this for all 10 until you have an ordered list of your top 10 values.

Here are my top 10 personal values:

Fulfillment

Inspiration

Contribution

Health

Family

Love

Creativity

Success

Truth

Integrity

If you like, write your Top 10 (or Top 5) in the comments below!

Your value hierarchy expresses your character of course. Someone who values adventure highly is a different character as someone who values stability more. Someone who values success highly is different than someone who values family on top.

An interesting exercise is also to create your top 10 negative values, which express what you really dislike or what is totally unimportant to you.

Are Values Fixed or Can I Change Them?

By there very nature, your value-system tend to be more stable, it is your character in it’s many facettes. But single values are not static and fixed. They can change. Personal values usually change when something big happens, or when you are consciously re-evaluating your life and make a decision, based on your experiences, to change your value hierarchy.

As an example I valued diversity a lot in my first business. Later I learned by experience all the drawbacks of doing a lot at a time and now I value simplicity more.

So what when you are dissatisfied with a value you have and what to change it?

For instance you may have the top value of stability and you want to become a bit more flexible in your life. (could be the other way around as well…) Changing this would work if you create experiences and enjoy them that are in alignment with the new value: flexibility in this example.

So to integrate a new value into your top-values:

Create positive experiences that express this value in your life

Decrease experiences that are aligned with the opposite value in your life

I’m author of this site and I could coach you to make a giant leap ahead in your personal life and your business. I founded Personal Breakthrough Academy, a powerful personal development video course to create your personal breakthrough. Sign up above to get started!

Comment by Myrko Thum

@Mario, Freedom and Wisdom are most important for you. So as a guide for decisions, anything that would try to box you in or keep you away from feeling free would be a serious problem. Courage, Significance and Adventure are asking for a very active lifestyle. So try to integrate events that reflect these values to feel fulfilled and aligned with your values. Money, Success and Wealth is not on your list, which is totally fine and interesting. It may be that you need to consciously work there to keep that area in balance for you.

Comment by Ingeborg

Hey Mirko,
how are you doing?
I did myself a bit of thinking on this subject in the past weeks,
i ended up with:
Compassion
Family
Independance
Making a difference
Personal Fulfillment
Personal growth
Teamwork
Trust
Vision
Wisdom
the order not being quite clear acutally ;)
what do you think?
thanks and take care
you’re doing a great job, very dedicated!
Ingeborg

Comment by Zack

I was reading that list and I was thinking that one of my top values is teaching/nurturing/showing/explaining a similar value system that you, Myrko, I think endorse, one that puts personal accountability into a societal situation. Anyone have a word for that?

Comment by Zack

Oh and by the way that little antidote at the end of your reply was a square hit on the nail of the hammer. I imagine that over-focus on work is the #1 misalignment of values. My bet for why this is so is that work has the appearance of being under our control; we can see immediate results if we work a little later, work a little harder, work our selves to the bone; we can satisfy that creative impulse that way. But with relationships it is a much slower process. We build them brick by brick when we have the time, the opportunity; and one mistaken move and we can do quite a bit of damage to what took along time to help create. That is so if you are aware that you are creating; building relationships. The greatest challenge though to the family/love value is that if is difficult to see the creative process in the simple mundane-ness of simply being with those we care for. The value-added of our time is not so immediately apparent. I am thankful that recently I have become more aware of the power of the mundane interactions. I will now (almost) watch a movie or some such other thing that I do not enjoy doing simply to have time with people I enjoy who do. I am working on it at least. Stealing time from career is the difficult part.

Although to be fair, there are a few more I would have liked to fit into my top ten! It seems far easier to think of things I don’t value highly, like power or wealth.
It would be interesting if you could manage to make sense of my list; I am going to have a try myself again, but it seems easier to make something of other people’s lists!

Comment by Myrko Thum

@Jor Barrie, I think knowing your values is foremost valuable for yourself as described in the post. You have honesty and integrity on 1 and 2 and that speaks for itself, you are obviously very truth-loving and wouldn’t comprise that for anything.
Then you have interpersonal, social values like empathy, love and peace which probably makes you a people person easy to be with. :-)

Comment by Lubna wain

Comment by Ali

I found it very interesting to assess what my core values actually are versus what I would like them to be. Had a hard time keeping the 2 separate.
What I think mine are now:
connection
harmony
comfort
integrity
health
balance
courage
clarity
happiness
passion

I would like to add discipline to that list, as well as increasing the importance of balance and passion, and add family. Fulfillment sure sounds good as well.

Comment by Mike

Comment by Maryam

Appreciating the post,I think we must be able to consider these moral value when we are in dilemma,I have seen people who clame these value but when they were in bad situation they put every thing under their foot and forgot everythings and consider only themslves or when we make mistake do we compensate it or we shrink all values. People who were in dilemma and kept their values they can clame that they have them,otherwise in my idea they clame a dream.And in my idea we must not judge people who put them under their foot somethimes we are the cause of it ,it happened to me apparently the guy was guilty but the root of that action was me,so I forgave him and so did he ,so there is not any formule for it ,it depends!